Conor Cruise O’Brien went off the rails towards the end of his career, adopting increasingly bizarre positions on Northern Ireland and uncritically supporting Israel. Few of his admirers followed him in these courses, yet for old times’ sake perhaps, they were reluctant to criticise their leader.

A handsome new publication provides a survey of that period of ferment and rejuvenation that, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘fashioned a new civic culture outside the scope of institutional religion, the colonial state and conventional politics’.

A new study examines Ireland from medieval times in the context of social organisation, how surplus wealth is created and deployed, how literacy affects authority and how elites foster a supportive class between themselves and the masses.

With so little available for the general reader on Irish literary culture between 600 and 1600, in either Irish or English, we have to wonder at the failure of most of the few dozen relevant academic Columbuses to report back to us on their explorations. To how many of them has it ever occurred that the occasional act of public communication would not be a sin against the integrity of their trade?

French Catholic culture offered a supplementary world, and in some cases a focus for unfulfilled longings, for those who found Free State culture insufficient or repetitive. Conor Cruise O’Brien’s Maria Cross can strike today’s reader as brilliantly eccentric, an anomaly; it should instead be regarded as the finest analytical product of a culture we have almost forgotten.

O’Driscoll raises the matter of the many conferences, launches, conferrings and other public events in which Heaney participates. “Ongoing civic service, I suppose,” Heaney responds ... Life has been good to him in many ways; poetry has enriched his existence both privately and in the social and intellectual worlds it has opened up to him. In return, though under no obligation to roll up his shirtsleeves and take part in the meitheal, Heaney performs his neighbourly duty as few in his position would.

The Irish Literary Revival, alongside many other similar movements of the time, was an attempt to transform Ireland from what it seemed to be becoming – a derivative, provincial British backwater given to exaggerated bluster about its Irishness – into an autonomous and self-respecting cultural centre. This is the logic behind Douglas Hyde’s “On the Necessity of De-Anglicising Ireland”. Quinn shows no interest in or understanding of this aspect of the Revival – it would, after all, involve getting to grips with the dynamics of Anglo-Irish cultural relations, with due attention to both sides of the hyphen.